Netflix and Amazon's original drama strategy evolves

Amazon’s upcoming original titles show a clear focus on sci-fi & fantasy and general drama series that fall outside of action and crime. While sci-fi and drama make up only 4.4% of the current line-up of original content on Amazon's US service, together they account for over half of announced upcoming titles. Netflix is making similar moves, with sci-fi & fantasy and drama constituting 9% of its current original catalogue, but 36% of its announced upcoming original titles.

Neither genre stood out in the mix of original content added to the catalogues over the past year, suggesting a recent strategic shift.

Genres showing a decline for original production are children & family and comedy. It may be that, especially in the case of children & family content, both services appear less keen to announce new titles—despite the genre’s clear value and importance. Recently added titles show that Amazon has maintained a focus on children's content, for example. Children's content accounts for 36% of Amazon's and 21% of Netflix's current original library, but for the upcoming titles only 9% of Amazon and 8% of Netflix original titles fall into this genres. Additionally, Amazon has recently added significant quantities of entertainment titles, creating spikes in the ‘other genre’ category for originals through May 2017-December 2017 and December 2017–July 2018. Announced upcoming titles show less entertainment content, however. Amazon has also announced several reality titles; their first foray into original content of this genre.